Carlo Mazzoni, L'Officiel Italy's Editor, Ready To Give Up Holidays For The Pride Of Italy

Carlo Mazzoni, editor of the new L'Officiel Italy, pens his first Editor's Letter:

L’Officiel is a fashion magazine founded in France in 1921. Today it is a
worldwide publication with more than thirty international editions.
Queen of Europe is the title of the first issue of the Italian edition: a
title chosen to convey challenge, alert, encouragement – or simply
ironic – it could be or not, Italy, the queen of Europe. Surely it is
not, for many reasons, most of them obvious – but we must remember that
the greatest queens in history revealed what they really were when they
rose from the dark, when they lifted their faces, stood up again, as
defendants.

Sobriety – it is the age of sobriety. Sobriety is
the sternness we need to achieve perfection. We need curiosity and
ambition, healthy virtues, to produce sobriety.

We need to give
up our holidays. Italy cannot afford long weekends every month and
frequent festivities during the year – not any more. Italy cannot afford
to be shut down in August. We need to give up our intellectual snobbery
– in other words, we need to give up our provincialism.

Wherever
we find merit, there’ll always be guilt. Ignorance is guilt. If you are
not wondering about what 1789 meant, why it changed the world – this is
your own guilt. If you can’t understand that reading, watching,
listening all mean using yourself in doing the world a service, this is
your own guilt.

L’Officiel Italia will talk about fashion. It
will not be a magazine about lifestyle or photography. Fashion is the
epitome of the textile industry – the second asset for the Italian
economy. In Italy, fashion gives employment to millions of people, but
more than this: fashion is the best image that our country is presenting
to the world. Italian fashion speaks an international language – and
this does not happen with our literary production, our poor pop music,
our promising cinema, or our infamous TV entertainment.

Most of
the major fashion companies in the world are manufacturing their goods
in Italy – it’s called made in Italy, and it’s quite celebrated. We, the
Italian people, should be deeply confident about this leadership: we
could rebuild our pride on this.

Proud. We are, and we will be,
proud: of these Italian companies so powerful in terms of industry and
branding – Armani, Prada, Dolce e Gabbana, Missoni – just a few among
many. Above all – we are, and we will always be, hugely grateful to
those men and women who founded and invented these companies.